1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a flash memory apparatus with a serial interface. Particularly, the invention relates to a device for resetting a flash memory chip with a serial interface and a method thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
In order to improve competitiveness of electronic products, parallel flash memory chips built in electronic products are gradually replaced by low-cost serial flash memory chips. In order to reduce the cost, the serial flash memory chip is generally packaged in a low number of pins. Therefore, the serial flash memory chip generally provides 8 pins of a chip select (/CS) pin, a serial data input (SI) pin, a serial data output (SDO) pin, a clock (CLK) pin, a write protect (/WP) pin, a hold (/HOLD) pin, a power (VDD) pin and a ground (GND) pin (“/” represents low level enable).
Namely, the serial flash memory chip generally does not provide a reset pin to allow a user to reset the flash memory chip from external. When the user wants to reset the flash memory chip, the user has to reset the power of the flash memory chip, so as to enable an operation of a power-on reset circuit built in the flash memory chip for resetting the flash memory chip. However, the power-on reset operation may probably reset the power of other circuits (for example, a controller) sharing the same power source with the flash memory chip. Therefore, the whole system that the flash memory chip is became too hard to be controlled, and initialization has to be re-performed, which may cause a great trouble.